OS X Lion growth stagnates at 16% Mac market share
The adoption rate of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has seen a drastic slowdown after enjoying strong initial sales and is only running on 16% of Macs, giving it the third largest install base behind Snow Leopard and Leopard.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is being run on 16% of all Macs after seeing a highly successful launch, but sales have slowed to a crawl, barely outpacing adoption of Apple's previous version Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard which is installed on 56% of Macs, according to a study by analytics firm Chitika.
When Apple's newest Mac OS X launched in July, it saw booming sales topping one million downloads on launch day, with Apple calling it the company's fastest-selling OS ever.
The new study shows that, until September, Lion sales were consistent, seeing a 4.05% monthly growth rate, though that has slowed to an average rate of 0.98% over the past two months.
In early October, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced during his company's iPhone keynote that Lion was its best-selling OS to date, with an adoption rate surpassing its predecessor Snow Leopard by 80%, netting over six million downloads. Cook went on to compare the launch of Lion with Microsoft's Windows 7, which he said took 20 weeks to reach 10 percent of the PC install base, a feat Lion accomplished in just two weeks.
"The once hyped OS X Lion is now in a state of arrested development; they?re growing, but not nearly at the rate newly released operating systems have grown in the past," writes Chitika's Ryan Cavanagh in the company's blog. "Historically Mac users are quick to adopt the latest Apple software, as in the case with our iOS5 report, leading us to believe there are some real issues preventing users from making the $29.99 upgrade."
Cavanagh goes on to say that Lion's downtick in sales may be attributed to stability issues with the OS, and cites user complaints over iOS-like features that give would-be adopters pause when deciding to upgrade.
Lion is slowly gaining ground on Mac OS X Leopard, which holds a 22% share of the market, though it seems unlikely that it will overtake leader 10.6 Snow Leopard any time soon as the older OS also continues to increase its 56% share.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is being run on 16% of all Macs after seeing a highly successful launch, but sales have slowed to a crawl, barely outpacing adoption of Apple's previous version Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard which is installed on 56% of Macs, according to a study by analytics firm Chitika.
When Apple's newest Mac OS X launched in July, it saw booming sales topping one million downloads on launch day, with Apple calling it the company's fastest-selling OS ever.
The new study shows that, until September, Lion sales were consistent, seeing a 4.05% monthly growth rate, though that has slowed to an average rate of 0.98% over the past two months.
In early October, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced during his company's iPhone keynote that Lion was its best-selling OS to date, with an adoption rate surpassing its predecessor Snow Leopard by 80%, netting over six million downloads. Cook went on to compare the launch of Lion with Microsoft's Windows 7, which he said took 20 weeks to reach 10 percent of the PC install base, a feat Lion accomplished in just two weeks.
"The once hyped OS X Lion is now in a state of arrested development; they?re growing, but not nearly at the rate newly released operating systems have grown in the past," writes Chitika's Ryan Cavanagh in the company's blog. "Historically Mac users are quick to adopt the latest Apple software, as in the case with our iOS5 report, leading us to believe there are some real issues preventing users from making the $29.99 upgrade."
Cavanagh goes on to say that Lion's downtick in sales may be attributed to stability issues with the OS, and cites user complaints over iOS-like features that give would-be adopters pause when deciding to upgrade.
Lion is slowly gaining ground on Mac OS X Leopard, which holds a 22% share of the market, though it seems unlikely that it will overtake leader 10.6 Snow Leopard any time soon as the older OS also continues to increase its 56% share.
Comments
The decision to sell a copy with install media only at much higher price probably have something to do with it.
Yeah, Lion sure is expensive.
$29.
Yikes.
Apple's always pushing technology forward, but perhaps a choice for Lion's install media would have been more appropriate. They could have tested the water with Lion, giving people a choice of DVD or App Store. 10.8 could then have been the time to let go of the old physical media installs.
Yeah, Lion sure is expensive.
$29.
Yikes.
You'll find it's $69 for the USB drive.
Yeah, Lion sure is expensive.
$29.
Yikes.
He'll come back with a comment about how Lion sold on a USB drive is more expensive. At which point I'll counter with: If there is no way to install the media then why would people buy Lion from the Mac App Store.
The Mac App Store is quite nice for this because you can never lose the software, if you have to re-download you get the latest version without having to reinstall all the updates afterwards, and you still get the ability to burn to disc if you so desire.
So, I run Lion in a virtual Machine - Parallels for now.
Just my two cents.
So after this company's data suggests retail sales have leveled off (as they always have; Apple has reported Mac OS X sales are mostly sold in the first quarter or two), that Lion is now a failure.
It then jumps to the absurd conclusion that the "downtick in sales may be attributed to stability issues with the OS," as if people are deciding not to upgrade. Lion is not less stable than Snow Leopard.
There's also way more Macs shipping with Lion (that can't downgrade) than ever shipped with any other OS. Another 4.9 million this last quarter. The installed base of Macs is not that large--around 30-40 million. That means new Lion Macs are destined to rapidly displace old versions of the Mac OS, an hesitancy to upgrade is meaningless because new purchases are such a big percentage of the installed base. Compare new PCs sold quarterly to the 1 billion installed base - its not nearly as large.
NetMarketshare shows that Lion has already well outpaced Leopard+Tiger, and is at 1.89% compared to Snow Leopard's 3.62% today. In other words, Lion is already #2 and more than half as big as the installed base of Snow Leopard machines.
Yeah lion is somewhat half baked, lots of good stuff with far too much bad :-/
-edit- oh and why does Logic 8 not work from the desktop... Totally brain dead
I'm sure the original 'download only' policy didn't help, following it with a more than 200% price increase for the USB stick wasn't much better either.
Besides, outside of the Mac faithful, the reviews have been less than favorable. Even Macworld has spent considerable time talking/writing about stuff that Snow Leopard used to do well that is broken on Lion. They've done at least three podcasts on that topic alone! One of them was mostly dedicated to terminal hacks to restore features from Snow Leopard. I don't recall that happening (at least not to that degree) with any other Mac OS release.
I think I speak for most designers and developers that issues with Adobe after upgrading to lion. It may sound trivial but after reading the bug issues that adobe reports on its website of "known issues" is enough to keep me from upgrading.
I have things to do that's why I bought a Mac. If I wanted to "trick" the operating system to do what I want it to, I would have bought a PC. I don't have time nor the patients to beta test an operating system that is available for retail.
Nothig personal apple I love yah :-) but I'm sure that others in the design world feel the same way I do. If I'm not mistaken the design market is a fairly large percentage...
http://www.obxwebdesigner.com
Yeah, Lion sure is expensive.
$29.
Yikes.
Yea, plus $900 for me to upgrade my old PPC software. Worth it in the end, but Lion plus iCloud vs MobileMe is a lot all at once...
(Granted, for $69 you can have it on a thumbdrive, still WAY cheaper than Windows. So not quite “download only.”)
One word Adobe!
I think I speak for most designers and developers that issues with Adobe after upgrading to lion. It may sound trivial but after reading the bug issues that adobe reports on its website of "known issues" is enough to keep me from upgrading.
If you’re suggesting that Adobe had PLENTY of time to find and fix criticial issues before Lion came out, via the same developer program everyone else uses, then you’re right. Sometimes I don’t know what’s wrong with Adobe. (I’m still on CS3... most of which runs fine in Lion. Not all. But thankfully, I’m fully operational without the missing pieces. Photoshop and Flash CS3 have been fine. I await CS6!)
If you’re suggesting that when Adobe drags their feet, Apple should hold back releasing their OS until Adobe fixes everying... well, that way lies doom. Not practical, even if Adobe ever DID fix the bugs you care about, which may or may not ever happen (look how bad Flash remains year after year). Not only would Apple lose tons of money and set their own innovation back for Adobe’s sake, but non-Adobe users would suffer the same delay as Adobe users! Better to release Lion to the world when it’s ready, let non-Adobe users have it as soon as they want, and pros can check with the vendors of their key apps before updating to new machines or new OS versions (as is standard business practice).
Apple is giving people the price break because it doesn't want to ship physical media. With physical media, Apple has to pay more for shipping, packaging, an handling. Further, it has to price the update high enough for third parties selling the physical media to make some sort of profit. Finally, Apple has to account for unsold inventory every quarter, which negatively effects earnings.
You might be right about the delivery method being an issue for some people, but paying $69 for an update that several years ago people would have happily paid $129 seems a bit silly.
I suspect as the article says it's partly the iOS feature-creep that some don't like, along with removal of Rosetta, and perhaps even the lack of Java (although it's auto-installed when needed). Also, I bet quite a high proportion of people are refraining because they don't have access to a high speed connection to download, or simply prefer to have a physical copy of the OS. Paying much more for a USB version isn't going to help matters.
Apple's always pushing technology forward, but perhaps a choice for Lion's install media would have been more appropriate. They could have tested the water with Lion, giving people a choice of DVD or App Store. 10.8 could then have been the time to let go of the old physical media installs.
There isn't much motivation to upgrade.
I suspect as the article says it's partly the iOS feature-creep that some don't like, along with removal of Rosetta, and perhaps even the lack of Java (although it's auto-installed when needed). Also, I bet quite a high proportion of people are refraining because they don't have access to a high speed connection to download, or simply prefer to have a physical copy of the OS. Paying much more for a USB version isn't going to help matters.